Tony and Maureen Wheeler:
For their honeymoon, they attempted to cross Europe and Asia overland and make their way down to Australia. It took several months and all the money they could earn, beg, or borrow. When they arrived in Australia, they were flat broke but couldn’t be happier. Urged by friends and family to tell them about their experience and how they did it (since so few had made that journey before), they stayed up at nights to write, type, and staple together their very first travel guide: Asia on the Cheap. Within one week, they had sold over 1,500 copies and decided to launch Lonely Planet.
LonelyPlanet.com:
One of the first websites on the internet, LP’s content and forum grew quickly. You could even consider it to be one of the first ecommerce sites on the web, with the ability to get an order form online and fax in your order.
LP Business Changes:
By 2007, LP had sold over 80 million copies, had over 500 titles, and was translated into 8 different languages. It had also expanded its digital footprint, getting into video, podcasts, and home rentals before it was the cool thing to do. This led to the purchase of LP by the BBC which held onto it for five years.
LP Today:
Nearing 150 million copies, LP has expanded to 14 different languages and is the largest travel publication company in the world.
DOUBLED Book in a decade (took us almost 30 years to get to 80 million) and yet we have given less emphasis to our core product (books) on our own website?
SEEMS CRAZY.
WHAT WE KNOW:
More female than male. | Average HHI of $100k | Core users are 25-35 | Largest Market Share in the world (and in the USA)
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT KANSAS CITY:
Roughly 1 in 4 Kansas Citians have been to LP (1/11 for larger metro) | Average HHI is slightly lower than our general audience | Not too adventurous… Online searches: 1-70 sights, grand canyon, hawaii
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT KANSAS CITY:
Roughly 1 in 4 Kansas Citians have been to LP | Average HHI is slightly lower than our general audience | Not too adventurous…
Purchased books: National Parks, Southwest USA, How to be a Photographer
You can see how other sites build this and what they are using here: https://trackermap.evidon.com/home/live/trackermap
Mountains of Data. How do you get through it all?
Research Managers
Duties include: Taking requests, setting up research, finding research, commissioning research
Research Hub
Place where all the research is stored and easily searched
Project Managers
Receive fortnightly research updates, despite their department
Put all of your ideas down. What areas of the business are you curious about? Where can you connect the dots? What needs to be monitored to see how it changes over time? What new products are you launching?
Put all of your ideas down. What areas of the business are you curious about? Where can you connect the dots? What needs to be monitored to see how it changes over time? What new products are you launching?
Where’s the money? That’s what this is all leading up to, right?
Strategy: Retarget like crazy. Right?
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Popular News Sites
Anywhere else that will show your ad…
THAT MAY LIFT SALES, BUT DOESN’T NECESSARILY INCREASE LOYALTY
Customer Journey:
Once a customer picks a destination (or product), it shows intent. Intent is supplemented by other items, such as hotels, restaurants, activities, etc > all telling us more about the customer.
We are then able to pinpoint what the customer is looking for (hotel, tour, guidebook), and our media team is able to target ads better that will be more relevant.
After customer acts (and if they have created a profile), we can do further follow-ups via email and facebook/instagram/app targeting.
A couple months later, we can send surveys to find out more about the customer’s future actions or experience.
Content is produced based on what people are looking for.
Traffic is monitored based on how people interact with that content.
Products are recommended based on those interactions.
Purchase history is fed back into the system, so that the best recommendation is given first when people are searching for that location.
We use further recommendations to similarly target post-purchase products, such as activities or at-home books.
Then we make sure that we include a feedback loop on all of our pages – to make sure nothing looks out of place.
Create another place for your customers to go, whether that is a forum, a facebook page, or an exclusive slack channel.
Forums work nice because it gets people to come back to your site, interact with other customers of your product, etc.
They create their own culture, giving them a reason to further explore your products and being part of the group. (Top: Match The Cover. Bottom Left: Bragging Rights. Bottom Right: Big Books)
Growing from our forum, we now include instructions on how to send us pictures when you find our products being used in the wild. From a friend’s bookcase, to strangers or people in location, each time someone sends us a picture they are becoming more invested in the brand. We can also tag the person, so their friends are alerted or they can share it on their wall.
Forums also provide a lot of context in what you are missing out on or interests of your customers. Sure, we may know the generic interest groups from a high level, but when someone logs in and does other things on the site, we are able to tie them directly to interests we wouldn’t have known about. Here’s an example of someone asking about diving/snorkeling with their kids. We were able to tie that info and pull in a Free GoPro HERO as it is something that a lot of divers use. And since they were talking about family – we hit them with a targeted email about sharing the magazine with their friends and family.
Content is key for Lonely Planet. Not only is it our lifeblood, but is the reasons that so many people come back to us. After many years allowing others write pieces for our site, we’ve been able to elevate our guest writers to key individuals, such as Anthony Bourdain to Prime Minister Trudeau and President Obama.
Breaking down barriers to that content with easy-to-use products like Google Home or the guides app.
Create partners with other brands to remind customers of your value.
Like most companies, we’ve expanded our product portfolio to be not just a vacation reference, but a home reference too: Coffee Table Books, Kids Books, etc.
And we also still do a lot of traditional advertising.
During the year, we’ll do random pop-up galleries that showcase our most popular places that people are talking about.
And since travel is a very cyclical industry (peaks when people have holidays / kids are out of school), we target areas with more traditional branding where we know we have lots of customers.
